More than 60 Podcasting Lessons Learned – 311

Episode Number: 311 Show notes can be found at: http://onceuponatimepodcast.com/311 Podcasting Lessons Learned are the most important part of the process. We all start podcasting somewhere, but I decided to share my podcasting lessons learned along my podcasting journey. A bit of a disclaimer first, this is not a Podcasting 101 course, so some items I will mention, but not go into complete depth. I will leave that to the Podcasting Gurus; Daniel J. Lewis (The Audacity to Podcast), Dave Jackson (School of Podcasting) Ray Ortega (Podcasting Roundtable) and others to discuss those subjects in more depth. Oh, one more disclaimer, as time marches forward, Social Media platforms will come and go, so I will try to talk more general in themes (that hopefully) will be applicable on any new platforms that we haven’t even seen at the time of this Blog post. Last time a podcast was posted was 3/6/16 Before we begin, I want to say something important. If you are a current podcaster, I want these points to encourage you. If you have never been a podcaster, I want to share something with you right now. So, to all you non-podcasters – look at your thumb. Go ahead, look at it. Your thumb-print is unique and so are you. Your life path, experiences and your point of view is different than anyone else’s, and we need to hear from you. If you need a reason to podcast it’s this – you are unique and special. As we go through this list and you’ve never thought about podcasting, I hope you will get some more intermediate and advanced tips and ideas to help you along the way. And now, here are my Podcasting Lessons Learned; 1. Count the Podcast Cost A podcast takes a lot of work. Read that again. Read it one more time. Lots of popular podcasters make it look easy, but it’s not. Now, I’m not trying to squash your podcasting dreams. I’m trying to give you the truths I learned (much later) – up front, so you know what to expect ahead of time. You’ll thank me later. Podcasting is a tough gig. It takes more time, energy, money, emotional investment than anything you can think of. We’ll leave that here for now, but if you stop reading (or listening to this podcast episode) before the end, at least you’ll know this fact. 2. Solo Host or Co-Host(s) There are lots of factors that lead to someone that listens to it consider it to be something they’d like to continue to listen to; – Quality of the audio of the finished product, – Quality of the speaker(s) voice, – Editing (limiting of extraneous information, filler words, etc), – Brevity (staying on point and limiting “rabbit trails“), – Likability of the speaker(s)’s speech pattern, – Speaker(s) knowledge of the subject, and much more. When I thought it might be fun to launch the OUAT Fan podcast, I asked my wife to join me as a co-host. There were many reasons; 1. Was that I was the sort of funny banter guy and she was the well-read, well-studied Disney, Fairy Tale, etc fan, 2. I figured the listeners would appreciate 2 different voices discussing the show, 3. She would save me when I (often) forgot a name of an actor that came up in an off-the-cuff comment (Note: Always prep well before recording.